


The Way of the Soul

by ViolettaValery



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Curses, Domestic Fluff, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Historical Inaccuracy, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, POV Alternating, Pagan Gods, Role Reversal, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:48:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26238151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolettaValery/pseuds/ViolettaValery
Summary: Every mission Alex goes on, it's like there's someone watching over him. It's more than the luck of the devil his father supposedly had; it's like he has a guardian angel.Then Scorpia tries to have him killed, and as he's recovering from a bullet to the heart, he's flooded with memories of him and Yassen. Memories that he certainly hasn't lived.
Relationships: Yassen Gregorovich/Alex Rider
Comments: 22
Kudos: 68





	1. What's past is prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This fic basically dropped into my head wholesale as I was trying to sleep and I wrote it down. Or most of it, anyway, I'm still unsure how it ends, so no promises about when it'll be completed. But I do have the first few chapters worked out. You'll need a knowledge of the books to get what's happening, I think, but it also majorly transforms them.

_London. A rooftop._

“You killed Ian Rider,” he says. “I’ll kill you.”

Yassen’s smile seems to mask something sad and weary. “You will try,” he acknowledges. “But no one has ever managed to.” 

For the life of him, Alex can’t decipher the emotion that hides behind those words.

Yasen disappears in a blink, as easily as he’d arrived.

_Point Blanc_

He creeps out of his prison, and miraculously encounters no guards. At one point, he sees a shadow gliding past in the distance. Yassen, with that smooth catlike gait.

Alex freezes momentarily, shaking his head. He doesn’t know Yassen’s gait. He’s met the man once. It might not even _be_ Yassen. He really must be tired.

But he also, miraculously, encounters no guards. That isn’t lost on him. And when he snowboards down the mountain on an ironing board, at some point the sound of gunfire miraculously fades away. One minute it’s there, two men with machine guns chasing after him, and the second it’s not, just the silence of the night and the wind in his ears.

It’s like there’s some guardian angel watching over him, he thinks.

_Brookland School_

It’s like looking in the mirror. Head to toe, from the uniform to the haircut, he’s staring at himself, with the sole difference of the feral snarl on his clone’s face.

A shot rings out, and the snarl morphs into shock, frozen on a now-unmoving face as his doppelganger crumples to the ground.

He dives for the ground, looking for cover, but there’s no more bullets coming, just the silence of the night. Looking up from his hiding place, he can’t see a single figure, not even a shadow of movement.

Unsurprising. Yassen’s always been a professional.

The thought freezes him. It’s the second time he’s assumed it’s Yassen, but he has no reason to think it.

 _Why?_ He wonders. Why is he so obsessed with this man who killed Ian, who shot Sayle point blank, who has god knows how many kills to his name? Why is the thought of this man as his guardian angel reassuring?

_Skeleton Key_

Tied up and about to go through a sugarcane grinder, Alex wishes with every fiber of his being that Yassen was here. But just when he needs him, Yassen is absent, leaving Alex alone and screaming at the top of his longs.

Sarov saves him, only to share with him a completely insane plan to change the balance of power in the world. Numbly, he lets himself be put on a plane to Murmansk, with a pit stop in Edinburgh, where he escapes and makes it as far as the airport.

But of course, the security guard doesn’t believe a fourteen-year-old with a crazy story about a megalomaniac with a bomb. Why would he? He dials the police and leaves the phone off the hook as he tries to explain what he’s doing there, but he has no hope that they’ll believe what they hear, either.

And yet, miraculously, the cavalry shows up in Murmansk, military forces swarming around him. As at Brookland, a shot rings out, seemingly out of nowhere, hitting Conrad squarely in the forehead and killing him immediately before he can touch Alex.

Then he finds himself facing Sarov and a gun.

“I’d rather die than have a father like you,” Alex says.

Sarov raises his gun and fires, but in the millisecond before it, another shot rings out.

Sarov falls, killed by two bullets, only one of them his own.

“How did you know?” Alex asks Mrs. Jones, after.

“An anonymous tip.”

Alex snorts. “You’re MI6. You’re telling me you couldn’t trace it?”

“No,” Mrs. Jones acknowledges. “We tried, but whoever called it in is a professional. It’s almost like you have – a guardian angel.” She frowns. Guardian angels generally don’t come along in their line of work. “Or the luck of the devil, like your father.”

_Venice_

The water is rising in his prison, and he’s just preparing himself to dive down the drain at the bottom of his cell and attempt to swim out when the door opens.

This time, there’s no mistaking him. It’s Yassen.

“Come on,” he orders. “Quickly.”

Alex obeys immediately. He likes to think it’s because he knows the gravity of the situation leaves no time for hesitation, but in reality, it’s because obeying Yassen’s command is the most natural thing in the world. Yassen is safe, and his body knows it on the most fundamental, instinctive level.

_London. Liverpool Street._

He doesn’t hear the shot, but he feels it, and looking down, sees the blood spreading across his shirt. He falls, and as the street tilts sideways, he sees his parents, his mother smiling while his father watches sadly.

Then the image morphs, and he’s looking up at Yassen Gregorovitch.

His brows are drawn together, a frown creasing them. No, sadness, marring the beautiful lines of his face. He’s seen that look on Yassen’s face before, and he tries to life a hand to wipe it away because it doesn’t belong there. Or maybe it’s merely a memory.

“No,” Yassen whispers, frantic. “No, not like this. Not again.”

 _Again?_ Alex has time to wonder, and then everything goes black.

The dreams that consume him, after, are strangely vivid. There’s him and Yassen, on a gondola in Venice, sitting side by side as they near the Bridge of Sighs, but the dream falls away like sand before he learns how it ends.

He’s just been in Venice, and Yassen is the last thing he saw. His pain-addled brain must have put those together in some strange parody of a lover’s tryst.

But then there’s also him and Yassen, in Paris, Yassen tugging him up the hundreds of steps to Sacre Coeur, the two of them laughing, sharing crepes form a street vendor. In a sumptuous palace, and they must be playing dress-up, because Yassen’s hair is long, their clothing old-fashioned and Yassen’s white shirt leaving little to the imagination regarding the firmness of his chest. A sword rests by his side, and behind him, the four-poster bed is suggestively rumpled.

A dacha outside of Moscow in winter, a fire burning in the hearth, and they sit cuddled together while a blizzard covers the countryside with a blanket of blinding snow.

He wakes up days later to a hospital room covered in cards, flowers, and balloons, but his eyes are immediately drawn to the bouquet of twelve white roses by his bed. They’re as white as the snow covering the dacha he just dreams, and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that they’re from Yassen.


	2. Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you'll start getting the sense of in this chapter, while this is directly inspired by Alex Rider canon, there's influences from The Song of Achilles, The Old Guard, the Captive Prince series, and Alexander Dumas novels. Lots of angst in this chapter, but the following one will have plenty of fluff!

The dreams don’t stop once he’s released from the hospital. They do, however, become distinctly more sensual. He and Yassen are kissing in a thousand different places: in a meadow of wildflowers, on some cute European bridge, beneath a vast sky of stars, on the ramparts of a castle, in an ancient temple. He knows they are only dreams, but they feel so real, something he’s lived and is recalling through the haze of time. He can feel the heat of Yassen’s body against his when he closes his eyes, the softness of his lips, his calloused hands, breath ghosting against his skin and – more. So much more. He wakes breathless and aroused from dreams of rumpled sheets and heated touches, Yassen’s lips around his hardened cock –

He drops back onto the bed and groans, stroking himself to climax in an embarrassingly short time that he can’t blame on teenage hormones.

He should be ashamed. Yassen is a ruthless killer. He killed Ian, the only family Alex has ever known. Even if, in some strange balancing of the scales, he’s protected Alex half a dozen times over.

And yet, Alex feels strangely drawn to him. He _wants._ He longs for the Russian at the very core of his being.

The dreams begin to consume him, until it is waking life that starts to feel like a dream. He goes through the motions of school, homework, exercise, cooking dinner, but he might as well be an automaton. He only comes alive when he’s able to crawl into bed and lose himself in another life. Does it matter that it’s an imagined one, if it makes him feel so much more alive than anything in his current pale routine?

Eventually, Yassen’s roses, which he had brought home with him from the hospital, wither, the petals falling. When they do, Alex discovers that one of those petals is a sliver of paper, its cream color perfectly matching the shade of the flowers and twisted artfully to seem but another petal. It has a phone number on it in neat, precise handwriting, and nothing else.

He knows whose number it is, and he calls it without hesitation.

Yassen answers on the second ring, his accented voice like a balm on Alex’s turbulent soul the second he hears it.

“We need to talk,” is all he says.

Yassen promptly shows up an hour later (quite the feat, with London traffic). He must have been in the city already, waiting for Alex’s call, instead of in some distant jungle waiting to assassinate a crime lord.

He shows Yassen into what is, he has realized lately, a living room rather lacking in character. Ian’s façade of a banker had been thoroughly convincing. Not that Alex had bothered to think much about interior decorating, either, not when the house he lived in felt like a temporary dwelling in between dreams.

“What have you remembered?” Yassen asks, settling on a couch across from Alex.

“Remembered?”

“Dreamed,” Yassen corrects himself.

“Us,” Alex says, humoring Yassen. “Together. But they don’t feel like dreams. They’re too vivid. Like memories, but they can’t be. I don’t know you.”

Yassen just smiles sadly. “You do.”

“You’re making no sense.”

Yassen sighs. “You’re remembering past lives.”

And suddenly Alex is furious. Why had he thought Yassen had any kinds of answers for the strangely vivid dreams consuming him? It’s not like Yassen put them there.

“Cut it out,” Alex snaps. “I know I’m not exactly the sharpest after getting shot, but you really think I’m going to believe that, what, we’ve kept reincarnating and finding each other? Bollocks.”

“You reincarnate. I’m immortal,” Yassen corrects patiently. He doesn’t seem at all annoyed by Alex’s disbelief, merely sadly understanding. Like he’s done this before, and this whole dance is familiar. He rises and walks to the kitchen with his characteristic grace – and there it is again, each of his movements so familiar to Alex, like he’s lived with them for a whole lifetime. Or lifetimes.

Yassen grabs a knife, the biggest one of an expensive set Ian had once bought, and walks back, unbuttoning his shirt. A memory of Yassen, sprawled in a sumptuous palace with an unbuttoned shirt, flashes across Alex’s mind.

“Here,” Yassen says, handing him the knife hilt-first. He parts the folds of his shirt, offering Alex his perfectly muscled chest. “Stab me.”

“No,” Alex says immediately. The word comes out before he can stop it. His entire body resists viscerally at the thought of hurting Yassen.

Yassen nods like he’s expected this response. Again Alex has the feeling that Yassen had done this before, many times, and isn’t that evidence in itself that what he’s saying is the truth?

“Then at least make sure it’s not a prop,” Yassen says, still holding out the knife insistently.

Hesitantly, Alex takes the blade, runs his finger along its edge. Which was a bad idea, since it slices his finger open, and he swears.

“Satisfied?” Yassen asks.

“It’s real,” Alex confirms. “What are you – “

Before he can finish his sentence, Yassen presses the knife to his chest, point first, and drives it in with a smooth and – and _practiced_ – movement.

“No!” Alex shouts as a chill descends on his entire body. He closes the distance between them, preparing to catch Yassen and help him gently to the floor, to staunch the blood, to do _something,_ but Yassen stands there like he doesn’t have a knife sticking out of his chest and smiles. “You see?” he says softly. He pulls the knife out, and before Alex’s eyes, the wound closes. Yassen’s skin is smooth as marble once again.

Alex is the one who almost falls, with Yassen catching him and lowering him to the couch.

“It’s real,” he breathes. “It’s real.”

Yassen goes to the kitchen, fetches brandy. “Drink,” he says. Alex takes the glass from him on autopilot and downs it.

Yassen sits quietly beside him, his warmth a comfort as Alex processes.

“Why?” he asks finally. “What are we?”

“It is a story too long for tonight. You already have much to digest.”

Alex considers retorting, but Yassen’s right. He doesn’t think he could deal with any more bombshells tonight.

“At least tell me how long we’ve been doing this,” he says.

“We met in antiquity,” Yassen answers. “Close to two thousand years ago? Dates get blurry after a while.”

He shouldn’t have asked, Alex realizes. Antiquity? _Jesus._ He definitely needs another drink.

“I don’t get it,” he says, once the bottle stands empty – mostly courtesy of Alex, though Yassen had a glass as well. “You’ve been going through this over and over again for hundreds of years. Why not just cut your losses, try to move on and spare yourself the pain?”

“I don’t think I could even if I wanted to,” Yassen says - somewhat enigmatically, Alex thinks. “I love you. Thousands of years couldn’t change that. And you dared to give me your heart in return. As long as you are in the world, how could I walk away from that?”

“I love you too,” he says. The words come automatically, but as soon as he says them he knows they’re true. He’s never said them out loud before, not in this life, but they’re warm and familiar like an old cardigan.

“I know,” Yassen says, and his eyes are full of wonder. “It has cost you, yet somehow, in every life, no matter who you’ve been made to be, it is always true.”

But what _is_ that cost? He has more questions than answers, but all he wants right now is to sleep – without dreams, thank you very much– before he can deal with his life being even more thoroughly and systematically upended than when Ian had died and dragged him into the world of MI6.

Slowly, telegraphing his movements, Yassen leans forward to press their lips together. Alex bends toward that kiss like a flower bending toward the sun, letting his eyes flutter closed and yielding to Yassen’s lips.

Their kiss is perfect. Yassen knows what Alex wants better than Alex himself, who hasn’t had much opportunity for kissing in between saving the world and getting shot. The tentative sucking, following by a bite; Yassen’s tongue pressing insistently into his mouth to explore it, suddenly forceful and claiming.

He lets himself go limp in Yassen’s arms and be claimed. With all these revelations, he feels unmoored, and Yassen his one port in a storm to which he clings.

“Bed?” Yassen offers when they finally part, and a thrill goes through Alex. Will they - ? They clearly have, before, and part of him wants to give himself to Yassen thoroughly, to discover just how well this man has come to know him over millennia and to have Yassen teach him what he likes.

And yet, he is technically a virgin, with no experience and little knowledge of what he and Yassen were to each other, besides lovers. What if he disappoints Yassen? That thought is patently ridiculous if Yassen has been faithful to him for millennia, and yet. He’s not the Alex Yassen once knew, not yet.

“To _sleep,_ ” Yassen says with amusement, and once again he’s done that uncanny trick of reading Alex’s mind. “Alone, if you wish.”

Alex realizes he does. He wants to be alone with his thoughts after Yassen’s extensive demonstration of just how much better he knows Alex than Alex knows himself.

He’s not used to being seen, to being _known_ like that.

“There’s a master bedroom that you can sleep in,” he begins, and then stops, realizing that the master bedroom is Ian’s.

Yassen seems to understand. “I can sleep on the couch, if you would prefer me to.”

“No, it’s just. Wouldn’t it be awkward for you? A dead man’s bed and all?” And one who’s dead because of Yassen, though he doesn’t say that.

Yassen shrugs. “I’ve slept worse places.”

“Whatever you want, then,” Alex says. He feels suddenly bone-tired, and the delicacies of sleeping arrangements so meaningless in the grand scheme of, well, everything. “Good night.”

He falls into bed and is out like a light, only to dream vividly of his deaths.

But mostly, he died bloody and young. He remembers swordfights and stab wounds and hails of gunfire. He remembers dying of pneumonia and hypothermia after carrying a vital missive through a snowstorm to warn of an oncoming attack. Of radiation exposure, after he walked into a nuclear reactor to turn a valve and prevent it from irradiating three nations. Being guillotined during the French Revolution, when as little as the wrong word uttered made one a suspect to the Committee of General Security and Alex played a dangerous game. A firing squad in Mexico, blindfolded – he wakes in a cold sweat from that one. And the worst, the one that makes him wake screaming, tortured to death, the smell of blood and sweat as his life flows from his body drop by drop.

“Alex?” Yassen’s voice rings out in the darkness. The light turns on.

“Sorry,” he says. “Did I wake you?”

Yassen merely crosses the room and sits on the edge of his bed.

“You are remembering your deaths?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” Alex acknowledges. “I didn’t realize I almost always died bloody.”

“It’s a curse,” he says. “In every life, you end up saving the world somehow, changing the course of history. Invisible forces always drive you to it. And you have the luck of the devil, but it always runs out. And my curse is that I can never save you. I can never stop it.”

Another memory flashes before his eyes then of Yassen giving him this exact same explanation. It’s the life after he’d been killed by firing squad, Yassen admitting with guilt in his eyes that he’d arrived too late by minutes, able to do nothing more than cradle Alex’s limp body in his arms.

“But you have saved me,” Alex says softly, putting aside for the moment his questions about what Yassen means when he says _curse._ It’s not the time for it, with Yassen looking so devastated. “More times than I can count in just this life. From Sayle, and in Point Blanc, and Venice and – in Murmansk, that was you too.”

“I try,” Yassen admits. “But I can only ever keep Fate at bay for a few years.”

“It’s enough,” Alex says firmly.

Yassen shakes his head, a sad, fond smile playing at his lips. “You always say that.”

He lies down beside Alex and holds him close before Alex can even ask him too. Again Alex is hit by just how uncanny it is to have a man who can read into the core of his very being and realize what he needs before even he himself does. He snuggles against Yassen, and for that night, at least, that keeps the rest of the dreams at bay.

Yassen stays with him as he slowly remembers, piece by piece, life by life.

“Are you sure it’s safe? I’m pretty sure MI6 has me watched, especially after the – “ assassination attempt. Strange, to remember so many deaths, to know that should he die, he would come back, and yet to feel a chill at the very thought of how closely he’d escaped death.

“I took care of it,” Yassen says enigmatically. “And it would be stranger for you to simply disappear.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Thankfully, it’s between school terms, though something like school seems meaningless in the face of millennia of lifetimes. And as Yassen settles in, he makes the house feel more like a home. He realizes now that the entire place was as nondescript as the entirety of the façade hiding Ian’s real life, but Yassen lights fires in the fireplace that even never used and decorates the place with bouquets of yellow wildflowers.

“Why?” he asks once, because Yassen doesn’t really seem like the flower type, the white roses notwithstanding.

Yassen just shrugs and says, “they make the place more homey.”

The memories primarily come at night, while during the day, they talk. Their conversations flow easily, and he finds he knows all of Yassen’s little habits and preferences, his quirks and his tells – even the ones he’s tried to stamp out when he became an assassin. It’s like they’ve known each other for years, which technically they have, except Alex still doesn’t remember most of it, and yet he seems to have a sixth sense for the parts of himself that Yassen instinctively hides.

They talk about what Yassen’s been doing since Alex’s last life. He already knows the basics: Scorpia, Malagosto, John Rider, contract killing. His uncle’s death, though he can’t find it in himself to feel anything about it anymore. If he really has been a pawn of fate for centuries, pulled into this kind of life, Ian, too, was nothing more than a pawn, playing a role set out for him to drag him into a life he hadn’t wanted. 

“I had heard Scorpia was an organization on the rise, to be feared and respected, and I thought that if I worked for them, I could hone my skills and have the resources needed to protect you,” Yassen explains. That’s what he does in the years when they’re not together, Alex learns: learning to fight and kill, for Alex’s sake.

“Did you know you’d end up mentored by my dad?” he asks.

Yassen shakes his head. “I never know exactly when you’ll be born, or to whom. I have to find you each time. It _has_ gotten easier with the internet, though. I suppose it’s a rather ironic twist of fate that I learned so much of what I need to protect you from your father.” 

Fate seems to have rather a lot to do with their lives, he’s realizing, and he really isn’t liking what he knows of her meddling so far.

After the deaths, he starts remembering the lives that led to them. The first few hundred years are the foggiest, but after that, they come to him with increasing clarity.

The first life he can remember, he’s also a spy, disguised as a servant – a slave, even. To protect his cover, he’s publicly whipped, a punishment reserved for commoners. The gods had had their laugh about that one, he was sure. His information ensures a successful clandestine attack on the enemy, and he even survives the whipping. Still, he wakes up in a sweat, remembering the flesh coming off his back.

In another life, he’s racing on horseback with another critical piece of intelligence tucked close to his heart as five men ride after him in pursuit, each sending arrows whistling past him. He employs every trick he knows, weaving through the treacherous terrain, hanging off the side of the horse, swinging around to face backwards and return fire at his pursuers as he rides. He gets close enough to the city gates to wrap the message around his final arrow and send it flying through the closing portcullis before he’s felled by a lucky shot from one of his pursuers, dying from the fall and the wound.

“I hate horseback riding,” he mutters when he wakes up from that one.

In seventeenth-century France, he’s a spy for cardinal Richelieu, protecting the interests of the crown against an adulterous queen. He’s sent to assassinate her lover, the Duke of Buckingham. Intercepted and imprisoned, he seduces the guard and accomplishes his mission, but it doesn’t stop him from being hanged like an ignoble commoner.

During Napoleon’s reign, he spies for Britain, passing on critical intelligence that eventually helps Wellington defeat the Emperor at Waterloo, but he’s caught and executed before he can see it come to pass.

He takes up the fight during the Greek War of Independence, waged against the Ottoman Empire to free a once-mighty nation and found its modern equivalent.

Under Queen Victoria, he gathers intelligence for queen and country. The Empire has many enemies, plots against the monarchy and Parliament, terrorism and civil unrest, and during two different lives under her lengthy reign (and how strange is that, that Victoria lives almost a century while he dies two deaths?) he works to keep the peace at the heart of a bloody Empire. He makes up for that a little, he thinks, with the aid he gives to a handful of revolutions and uprisings in Central and South America. That is, if anything like balancing the scales is even possible in the great cosmic joke that is his life.

In the Russian Revolution, he takes up arms for the Red Army, fighting for Yassen’s people.

Each time, Yassen is by his side. Each time, Yassen finds him, and protects him, and then, inevitably, watches him die.

“I just go where the course of history seems most turbulent, and there I find you,” Yassen had once explained when he’d asked how he found him.

In the Second War, he spies for Britain as Yassen does for the Soviet Union. Their two countries allied, they have a handful of years together, fighting back to back, infiltrating classified facilities to gather intelligence on the German nuclear program. The world is afire around them, but they catch some fleeting happiness as they work together in perfect unity.

Until Alex is captured and shot unceremoniously.

The memories come like cascades of water over Niagara Falls, a veritable flood until he feels like he might drown under the weight of them all. Yassen holds him on the nights when he needs it, but mostly he gives him the space to process the onslaught. He is a perfect gentleman, never pushing, never taking intimacy beyond chaste kisses, letting Alex set the pace, and Alex is infinitely grateful. He doesn’t feel ready to be what Yassen wants or needs, and how fucked up is it that he has dozens of lifetimes of memories, and yet he feels like only half a person, a sliver of the man Yassen loves?

Then, one night, he wakes up twice from dreams of death by torture and feels terribly, desperately alone in his empty, dark bedroom. He’s remembered so many lonely lives, so many years before Yassen had found him in each life, and bloody deaths to go with each one, and suddenly he doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

He makes up his mind.

The next day, he goes through Yassen’s closet while Yassen is out and picks out one of his starched white shirts. It’s too big for Alex, who has yet to have the growth spurt Yassen insists awaits him, and comes down to his thighs, while the sleeves need to be rolled up.

Perfect.

He waits until after dinner (Yassen has taken to cooking for the two of them, delicious homemade meals made to perfection and Alex’s exact preferences, which Yassen doesn’t even have to ask for). Yassen has retired to his room for the night, and Alex knocks on the door, trying to calm his nerves. He’s been on life-and-death missions, for goodness’ sakes; why is he so frightened at the prospect of _sex?_

“Come in!” Yassen calls. Alex pushes open the door and, before he can lose his nerve, leans in the doorway in what he hopes is a seductive pose. He’s wearing nothing but the shirt, half-buttoned.

Yassen takes him in from the bed where he sits and swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Alex?” he asks, sounding rather hoarse.

Alex undoes a button, and the folds of the shirt part to leave nothing to the imagination.

“I wouldn’t mind some company tonight,” he says.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Yassen breathes. Alex doesn’t think he’s ever seen him this flustered, and for a moment, all his worries flit away. “Come here.”

Yassen spreads his legs, and Alex comes to stand between them, the too-big shirt hanging off one shoulder. He tries leaning forward to kiss Yassen, but Yassen is quicker, smashing their lips together while firm hands land on Alex’s hips. Alex barely has time to acclimate to being kissed so intensely and ferociously when Yassen flips them with dizzying speed, tumbling Alex onto the bed and towering over him. It knocks the wind from Alex, until he can only lie there and stare up breathlessly at Yassen. He tries to at least helpfully divest himself of the rest of his shirt, but Yassen merely uses it to restrain his wrists above his head, then spreads him out and sets out to map his body with kisses.

“Don’t you already know every inch of me?” Alex asks with a laugh as Yassen continues methodically over _literally_ every inch of his skin.

“It’s different every time,” Yassen explains, and then returns to his ministrations.

“You mean my appearance changes?” Alex asks, intrigued. He _thinks_ he’s always looked the same, but his own looks are hardly the most vivid aspect of his memories.

“No, but your scars do,” Yassen says.

“Oh.” Some of the heat seems to dissipate with that.

Yassen’s fingers trace the bullet scar over his heart. “This is new,” he says unnecessarily. Then, pressing a kiss to Alex’s abdomen, “As is this. Last time, a stab wound here. And in your first life, you already bore the scars of many battlefields when I met you.” He takes Alex’s hand, kissing the knuckles one by one. “Many lifetimes ago, your fingers were broken, and they never healed properly.” He runs a finger down Alex’s side, tracing his ribs, his hip, his thigh. “You were whipped, once,” he says sadly, and Alex shudders at the memory. “Too young for that kind of cruelty, and you carried the scars on your back for the rest of your life.”

“And how long was that?” Alex asks. He remembers the whipping, but less so the details of his life after that.

“Two years,” Yassen admits.

Alex doesn’t press anymore. Does it matter how he went, that time? He realizes that Yassen has been watching him lose parts of himself for centuries. How many parts of himself did _Yassen_ lose, in the process? 

He reaches up to kiss him, a bid for distraction for the heavy topic, and Yassen lets himself be distracted easily. They kiss and kiss, their bodies seeking each other, their arousal pressed between them.

Then, Yassen shifts to reach for the lube and Alex freezes up again.

“Yassen,” he says, worry creeping into his voice.

Yassen pauses. “Yes?”

“You know I’ve never done this before, right?” His stomach swoops with nervousness. He has none of the experience that Yassen has gotten used to expecting from him. Yassen must have lifetimes of happy memories of them, experienced men bringing pleasure to each other, and by comparison he’s an inexperienced teenager -

Yassen’s lips quirk up with amusement. “I’m quite certain you have,” he says.

“You know what I mean,” Alex retorts. “I still don’t remember much of – _that._ ” 

Yassen just kisses him softly. “Then let me remind you. They do say it’s like riding a bike, and I’m sure the adage applies here.”

He doesn’t think people meant reincarnation when they used that particular idiom, but Yassen’s unflappable calm is infectious, and he feels himself relaxing. At the very least, Yassen knows what _he_ likes, and suddenly Alex wants nothing more than to give himself to Yassen and allow him to take what pleasure he will from Alex’s body. To be claimed and to _belong._

“I’m yours,” he whispers, and means it completely. “Take me. I’m yours.”

Yassen seems to understand what he means, as he makes no protest. He is meticulous in his preparation of Alex’s body, but once Alex is open and ready and wanting, Yassen does not hesitate to take him, thrusting deep. Alex can only gasp at being so filled; it feels like he has discovered what it is to have the other half of himself complete him, the closing of a circle that renews itself eternally. He doesn’t even care for his own pleasure, though Yassen ensures it; he merely surrenders himself to a man who knows him body and soul because he makes up half of each.   
  


After, they lie together, Alex’s head pillowed on Yassen’s chest.

“What was our first time like?” he asks as he traces the lines of Yassen’s body, perfect and immaculate. Unlike Alex, he carries no scars and no marks.

Yassen smiles wistfully. “You were a warrior, and your fame and glory preceded you where you went. You came to conquer my people, and I was sent to your bed.”

Alex startles, and props himself up on an elbow to look down at Yassen.

“I _conquered_ you? Did I - ?” He doesn’t even know how to phrase it, horrified at the implications. Is that really the kind of person he was, who went around conquering and slaughtering and taking what he wanted?

Perhaps he deserved this punishment, for what he once was.

“No. I came willingly,” Yassen answers, once again as if he’s read his thoughts.

Alex sighs with relief. He had been no saint, that was clear, but at least he didn’t do _that._

“It was rather like tonight, actually, except I was the one who came to you,” Yassen continues, and he’s still smiling, more genuine than Alex has ever seen. “You were older then. Tall and broad-shouldered, covered in tattoos to commemorate your many victories and twice my size. But you were gentle.” Yassen’s smiling even wider night, and it’s like there’s stars in his eyes. “You took me as yours, and we were happy.”

Alex has trouble imagining it. It’s strange to think of himself as the seasoned warrior, and Yassen under his protection. All he has ever known is Yassen protecting _him._ And it is _Yassen_ who is gentle, keeping his unfathomable skill and unyielding strength at bay with every touch.

Then, it’s as if Yassen suddenly shakes himself out of a stupor. The heaviness returns to his body.

“We were both so young and naïve then. We hadn’t yet learned that happiness always has a cost,” he says.

“What happened?”

“The gods cursed us.” 

Gods? What gods? “What does that even _mean?_ ” 

“Don’t,” Yassen says softly.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know?” 

“You will remember soon enough. Leave it be until then. It’s better that way.”

“Better me remembering through nightmares than having you tell me?” Alex insists.

Yassen sighs. “I have been through this more times than I can count, and I remember each and every one,” he says. “You always think that if I tell you, it will prepare you for the memories somehow. We tried it that way, but it only ever makes it worse. You start to dread the memories and avoid sleep, and wear yourself out with worrying, and then you barely have the strength to bear them when they do come. So trust me when I say it’s better this way.”

And Alex does trust him, with an instinct in the core of his being that, he now knows, dates back millennia.

“Then tell me about the past lives I have remembered,” he asks instead.

“Why, if you have those memories?”

“I want to hear it from you. Unless – unless it’s too painful.”

“I’ve learned to live with pain,” Yassen says, and he begins to talk. He tells Alex what was won each time he paid the bloody price. The calamities he prevented with each bloody death, the peace earned with his screams, the lives he saved running headfirst into danger.

He sounds like a poet spinning a tale, like Alex is some great hero, returning to the world when called upon to right its wrongs. But he is no hero, only a man – and barely that, in this life.

“Each time, you truly changed the course of the world,” Yassen concludes. “And each time, you paid for it.”

“But _why?”_ He’s running out of patience. It’s infuriating, that Yassen could just tell him, but who is he to argue with Yassen, when Yassen remembers every minute of everything they’ve been through?

“Soon,” Yassen reassures. “It will come to you soon.”

He speaks it like it’s a death sentence.

…..

The last death Alex remembers is the one at Yassen’s hands.

It had been one of his first few times through this endless cycle, and Alex was more boy than man, barely nineteen. Yassen had found him only a year earlier, and Alex hadn’t even remembered most of his other lives yet.

But here he was, captured and imprisoned. Torture was a gruesome and bloody thing in those days, and as Yassen sneaks into the dungeon where Alex is kept, disguised as a guard, he knows there’s no hope. They’ve used awful devices, broken his limbs, cut his tendons. He’s covered in more blood than Yassen thinks he’s ever seen.

“Alex,” Yassen murmurs, gathering him up into his arms as carefully as he can. Still, it hurts the boy, but Yassen thinks Alex would want the comfort of touch now, even if it hurt a little more. His cheeks are tear streaked, his face much too young for the pain Yassen finds there.

“Ya-Yass’n,” Alex croaks. It’s all he can manage, voice hoarse from screaming. Thank god they hadn’t cut his vocal chords, at least.

“Shh. You’ll be all right,” Yassen reassures him, though it hurts him to lie to Alex.

Alex’s eyes flutter closed. His breathing is slow and labored, his chest barely rising and falling. There’s little guarantee that he’d survive if Yassen got him out of here, and even if he did, he’d never walk, never run. He’d hurt in a thousand different ways every time he moved, not to mention the scars on his psyche.

He knows what he has to do, though it brings him no joy.

He leans forward and presses a kiss to Alex’s lips, the slightest one, to which Alex struggles to respond, but he cannot even do so much as move his lips. Yassen knows, then, that what he’s chosen to do is right.

“Until next time,” he whispers softly, and slices open Alex’s throat.

His death is a quick one, the cut deep and the blood gushing freely. Yassen holds him in the final throes, as his body fights to the last and resists death. That’s his Alex, full of life to the last, daring death and escaping it by the skin of his teeth again and again, until he meets the bloodiest one he can find.

He leaves as quietly as he’d come and drowns himself in drink for days. That way, he doesn’t have to remember Alex’s body going limp in his arms. He doesn’t have to imagine how Alex will greet him the next time.

 _Next time._ There can be no next time, he realizes. He will stay away. Watch Alex from afar, protect him as needed, keep death at bay for as long as he can. But how can he ask for Alex’s love after taking his life? Alex won’t want to face him.

He succeeds in staying away for half a century. Three lifetimes, for Alex – he dies at sixteen, despite Yassen’s best efforts, then at fifteen and at nineteen. Much too young, each time.

But Alex is quick and clever. He notices his guardian angel, even at a distance, and pursues him. And once he sees Yassen, well – his last memories must be sharp and vivid enough that the mere sight of Yassen sends them flooding back.

He’d expected anger, fury, disappointment, betrayal. Fear, even, from his fearless Alex. He hadn’t expected Alex to throw himself into Yassen’s arms like he’s the only port in a storm.

“Why did you leave me for so long?” he asks plaintively.

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me, after I – “ he can’t say it. He still sees it, when he closes his eyes, but he can’t say the words.

Alex can, though. “After you saved me from a slow and painful death,” he says firmly. “I wouldn’t have survived and we both knew it. It was only a question of how I went.”

“Still,” Yassen says. “You have a memory of dying by my hand, now. I can’t expect you to look at me as before.”

“You’re my savior,” Alex insists. He’s so young, in this life, still a teenager, though as usual looking older and wearier than his years. But if he has his memories, he is almost as old as Yassen himself. This isn’t a youngster’s puppy love. He’s heard Alex say the same thing too many times, at all ages.

“Promise me you won’t leave me again,” Alex demands.

Yassen wonders if Alex knows what he’s asking. What the cost is, for Yassen.

“I promise,” he says easily. Those fifty years without his Alex were the hardest he’d lived. He’d pay any cost to be by Alex’s side again, and for him that’s not an abstract phrase. He knows exactly what it means, and that doesn’t make it any less true.

And besides, is it not a price he should be willing to pay, after everything he has put Alex through? 

Alex wakes up from that memory in Yassen’s arms, and as always, Yassen expects him to jerk away and flee from the hands that killed him. How could he say, when the memory of Yassen taking his life in an embrace just like this is so fresh and vivid?

But instead, Alex curls into him and clings tight as if to a lifeline. Even after a hundred lifetimes, that devotion still catches him unawares.

“Hold me,” Alex whispers, and sobs into Yassen’s chest until he has no more strength for weeping.

And then, last as always, comes remembrance of their first life together, the only one they had the chance to live out fully. Alex always falls into a trance for that one, the story too long and vivid for something as fleeting as a dream. Yassen recognizes its onset immediately, the way Alex goes still with a teacup halfway to his lips, then limp, and Yassen catches the delicate china cup, then Alex’s body, lowering him onto the couch.

He settles in to watch the fairytale slumber from which nothing will wake Alex until he knows everything, and he waits, and he wonders if this will be the time that Alex finally withholds his forgiveness for all that has come to pass. 

After all, Yassen is the reason for his curse. It would only be just if Alex finally blamed him for it.


	3. better to have loved and lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And following the angst, thousands of words of (mostly) delicious domestic fluff and devotion. 
> 
> Also, there's no historical accuracy whatsoever in this. None. I conflated a bunch of history and made a lot of things up and drew on what I knew from history classes and just kind of threw it together.

He is a warrior, the best of the Greeks and the beloved of the gods. Golden, glittering Alexander, who helps fell Troy and found Rome. The gods have gifted him with speed and skill, grace and an almost everlasting youth, and he happily spills blood in their name. Fame and glory follow wherever he treads, and he is content with his laurels as the gods are content with the devotion he brings as he turns the conquered into new worshippers. General of the Empire’s armies, he advances further and further east, and the Germanic peoples fall to him, and the Magyars, and then he comes to the Slavs, pale and hardy from the harsh winters of their land.

They don’t fight. They see the might of Alex’s army and surrender to spare the bloodshed and death of their own. Alex is disappointed by the lack of a battle, but he is here for the Empire and the gods as much as himself, and he has fealty to claim and negotiations to lead.

He rides into their town almost as if he had conquered it, welcomed with honor and laurels, and the first night, they bring him to a feast. The food is plentiful and alcohol flows freely – not wine, there is little of it in these cold climes, but a clear liquid so potent that a glass of it has the effect of a blow to the face. Alex’s tolerance against intoxication is nigh divine, another gift of the gods, but still he abstains from more than two glasses throughout the night. It would be easy for these people to ply them with such drink and then catch them unawares; had he not used such tactics before, himself, when necessity called for it? He has often warned his soldiers of such dangers, and he sees that most of them remember his advice, drinking within measure.

After the fest is cleared, there are entertainments, minstrels who sing in a strange foreign tongue and dancers who move with a dizzying speed as they wield staff and sword, half a dance and half a one-sided fight.

There is one that catches Alex’s eye. Dancing shirtless, he is pale as the snow of his land and smooth as the unpainted statues of Alex’s people. Slender compared to Alex’s bulk, but when he dances, Alex can tell he is far from frail. He has a dancer’s strength and grace – which is the same as a warrior’s really, except that its ends are different. He swings a staff with dizzying speed, as Alex would swing a sword, twisting and whirling and pirouetting, and it would be so easy for those movements to flow into offensive ones, meant to defeat. But Alex is enchanted by movements themselves, the perfect control of each rippling, honed muscle, the potentiality of battle within him, but unfulfilled, stowed away, with only the warrior’s grace on display. He would make the model for an excellent statue. Not a discus thrower of bulging muscles, but an athlete with more speed than strength.

Alex wants him for himself.

He leans over to an elder who had welcomed him. “Who is that?” he asks without taking his eyes off the dancer.

The man looks altogether too delighted to answer. “Yassen,” he says. “Our word for ash tree. He is one of our most gifted dancers.”

“That he is,” Alex agrees. A blush creeps up Yassen’s skin from the exertion, blooming on his otherwise pale body, and Alex imagines that flush on his skin from a different kind of exertion.

Something to investigate later, he thinks, if the opportunity presents itself. Many of his soldiers stumble away from the feast with a man or woman who’s caught their eye, but Alex retires for the night alone. There will be plenty of time for such pleasures later.

As general, he has been offered the most sumptuous dwelling, belonging to the highest in rank among these people – an elder who leads the council. Where the Romans build with stone, these people build with wood, and his cabin of rough-hewn logs is so unlike the spacious, airy structures of his home. But he likes its rustic simplicity, with its giant hearth and a bed spread with woolen blankets and pelts against the cold.

Settling in to write a missive to send back – a report of their welcome, and his hopes for the upcoming negotiations – he hears voices outside and comes to the door.

“You have a guest, my lord,” one of his guards tells him.

Alex lets his eyes travel to the cloaked figure. There’s not much light, only a handful of torches, but he can make out Yassen’s features, his eyes downcast.

Yassen bows as soon as he feels Alex’s eyes on him. Alex realizes immediately what kind of guest it is. The guard knows it too, but his face is carefully blank. He’s used to welcoming such guests into Alex’s quarters.

“Of course,” he says. “Do come in.”

He closes the door behind himself and gestures. “Welcome,” he says. “Would you care for a drink? And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

The last question is superfluous, but he does like to hear it when they try to explain why they’ve come, stumbling over the words.

But Yassen isn’t shy. He lets the cloak fall, revealing his naked body, long pale limbs dusted with equally pale hairs. Alex shivers at just the sight of him, from desire and cold equally. The air is frigid outside. But Yassen seems unperturbed, by either the cold or Alex’s gaze.

“Vyacheslav said you asked after me tonight,” he says, meeting Alex’s eyes. “I thought perhaps you would enjoy my company, and a bedwarmer. The nights are cold here in our land.”

Alex approaches, traces the line of Yassen’s shoulder and arm.

He doesn’t tremble at Alex’s touch.

“You thought?” he asks, wanting to know how willing Yassen is. He prides himself that he has never taken a lover by force.

“I thought,” Yassen confirms. “The elders agreed.”

A willing gift, then. A pity that he’s already unwrapped. Alex would have liked to do it himself.

“Come to bed, then,” he says. “Or would you like some wine first?”

“Perhaps,” Yassen murmurs, placing a hand on Alex’s chest, “we will enjoy the wine after, my lord?” He flutters his eyelashes, the pale hairs of them limned in candlelight, a gorgeous chiaroscuro. It is an unpracticed move, or so practiced as to seem innocent.

But Alex has taken many a lover to bed, and he is more than familiar with faux innocence. Yassen’s is the real thing, he thinks.

He lets himself be gathered into Alex’s arms and kissed, passionately and forcefully. He returns the kiss with equal fire, and Alex presses him ever closer, suddenly intoxicated by how perfectly his slender frame fits into Alex’s arms. He moans, even, helpless little sounds that Alex catches with his lips, and when he draws back, Yassen’s pale skin is flushed, his lips kiss-swollen and his pupils dark.

And, of course, his arousal presses insistently against Alex in the intimacy of t heir embrace.

Alex hefts him easily into his arms, as he would carry a bride, and deposits him onto the bed. Then he stands back and admires. Yassen spreads himself over the bed easily, his long limbs all akimbo, legs spread invitingly and head tilted just slightly to the side so he can look up at Alex through half-lidded eyes.

He is also obviously no virgin, so visibly at ease with what’s to come. A relief, that. Some of the peoples they’ve conquered had an obsession with that useless abstraction, sending him untouched damsels like they’re some great gift. They had taken one look at his imposing size and trembled like a leaf at his lightest touch, and he had sent them away, frustrated rather than pleased.

Alex is suddenly ravenous. Every thought of taking his time, coaxing gentle cries from Yassen and drawing out his little pleasures, evaporates. He wants to take, to _ravish,_ and Yassen seems more than willing to allow him, not a drop of tension in his entire frame.

No, a drop. Just the slightest taste of it, the way his eyes widen when he catches a glimpse of Alex’s size. Alex is unsurprised. Between his patently visible physical strength and his reputation, he is imposing. He could easily quell any resistance, take whatever he desires, and Yassen knows it, but he hides it well.

But Alex won’t hurt him. There is something so precious about Yassen that Alex doesn’t even have the words for it, and to do otherwise than be gentle feels like blasphemy.

He crawls onto the bed between Yassen’s spread legs and captures his mouth in another kiss while his hand snakes downward to find his opening. He’s not entirely surprised to find Yassen prepared for him, and it makes him groan against Yassen’s lips, his restraint teetering on a precipice. He has no patience for foreplay with Yassen so open and willing for him.

Yassen seems to read his conflict. “Don’t wait,” he coaxes, and Alex needs no other invitation. He thrusts inside, and Yassen gives a little cry at the size of him, but adjusts almost immediately and shifts his hips, aligning their bodies perfectly to allow Alex to bottom out inside him.

He groans, burying his head in the side of Yassen’s neck. Yassen’s body is perfection with how Alex fits inside him. As if Yassen was made for him by some artisan god, molded out of his very desires. He begins to move, and it makes Yassen throw his head back with a moan of pleasure, exposing a delicate swan neck while his legs wrap around Alex’s torso, keeping them locked together, making it impossible for Alex to pull away should he want to. He matches Alex’s movements, so that with each thrust Alex buries himself deep, and Yassen moans with pleasure each time, his nails digging into Alex’s back to leave trails of pain.

It is too much; it simply cannot last. Then again, he doesn’t have to make it last. Yassen is here for his pleasure, and he spills freely inside him. Yassen has taken himself in hand by this point, and his climax follows Alex’s shortly. A bit impertinent, not to seek Alex’s permission first, but he can’t bring himself to care. He sighs contentedly and collapses next to Yassen. They’ve made a mess, but they can worry about that later. For now, he pulls Yassen to his side and lets his body relish the post-coital bliss.

Some time later, Yassen disentangles himself to fetch them wine – some of Alex’s own, brought along with them on their journey. He watches the glorious curve of his body in the firelight as he moves, and then watches carefully as Yassen pours the wine to ensure he’s added no sedative.

“Will you join me again tomorrow night?” he asks when Yassen returns, handing him a glass and settling beside him on the bed.

Yassen seems surprised, but answers almost eagerly. “As many nights as you wish, my lord.”

Pensively, Alex traces a couple of fingers from the inside of Yassen’s knee to his thigh. Yassen lets him, stretching his leg out to give Alex better access. He seems utterly at ease, that slightest hint of wariness Alex had remarked earlier absent now.

“Do I frighten you?” Alex says, suddenly curious.

Yassen hesitates. Alex keeps silent, waiting for his answer.

“No,” he admits finally, and Alex wonders why that is the answer that made him hesitate. “I should fear you, perhaps, but I don’t.”

“Why?” Alex asks.

Yassen blinks, like the question is a strange one. He shrugs.

“ _Should_ I fear you?”

“No,” Alex says. He decides then and there that Yassen will never fear him. Whatever else he may do in this life, he will never give Yassen cause to flinch from him.

“Would you like me again tonight?” Yassen asks. He has finished his drink and sits loose-limbed against the headboard. Alex is tempted, but he also knows Yassen is a pleasure best savored over many nights.

“Not tonight,” Alex says. “But stay. The nights here are indeed cold, and I seem to recall the promise of a bedwarmer.”

Yassen inclines his head. “As you wish, my lord.”

He lets Alex pull him into his arms and settle in behind him. Yassen is surprisingly warm for someone so slender, Alex thinks, and as the two of them settle beneath the thick pelt, he finally forgets the abominably frigid air of this place.

Yassen is still in his arms when he rouses the next morning. Another day, he might have taken his time, continued what they began the previous night, but he cannot be late for his own negotiations. Not on the first day. There are impressions to make.

“You will come tonight?” he asks as he dresses. Yassen nods. He’s still in Alex’s bed, looking like he belongs there, only the bear pelt hiding his nakedness.

It’s a practically irresistible sight.

“In fact, come every night,” Alex says on a sudden whim. “My guards will have instructions to allow you inside as soon as you are finished with your duties.”

“My lord? Are you certain?”

It is perhaps too early to allow the man such liberties; he barely knows him. The lack of poisoned wine last night means little; he could still have been sent to seduce and soften him, coax him into letting down his guard before slipping a draught into his drink.

But if that is their plan, they are woefully naïve. Many have tried such ploys, and none have succeeded. Alex will simply accept the pleasure offered by Yassen’s body, and in the meantime he will be wary, and have his food and wine tested as he always does, until he can be certain of Yassen’s loyalties.

And if the man thinks to somehow overpower him – well. Fewer have tried that, and for good reason.

Alex approaches him and draws him into a kiss. “I like to have what I want,” he says simply. “And I want you.”

“Then you will have me,” Yassen acquiesces.

He goes to the negotiations. He offers what the Empire always offers: Yassen’s people will give tribute, in gold and grain, or an equivalent. They will build a temple to worship Alex’s gods, though they are welcome to continue to pray to their own. They will give soldiers to the Empire’s army, and in return, they will have protection.

“That is all?” The elder who had given him Yassen’s name – Vyacheslav, his name must be – asks. They shift uncomfortable, as if expecting that he has left a greater price for last. 

“Yes. Why, did you think I would enslave your women and kill your men?”

He throws the idea out because it’s patently absurd. He has no interest in needless killing, and in the long term, it is impractical. It merely foments rebellion. But from the faces that greet him, he can tell that it is, indeed, what they feared.

“We have been threatened with conquest from all sides, for as long as we can remember,” Vyacheslav says. “Word comes of the Goths and the Mongols and the terrible terms they exact, not unlike those you just referenced in jest.”

“We aren’t barbarians,” Alex retorts. “And if such ones come, we offer you protection from them.”

They are eager to comply, after that.

True to his word, Yassen is waiting for him that night, naked beneath the bear pelt as if he had never left. As the previous night, he is prepared for him.

Alex scoops him into his arms and fucks him, feeling the weight of the day slide off his body with each thrust into Yassen’s willing frame.

After, Alex offers him clothes – his own look pleasantly large on Yassen’s slender figure – and they dine. The wine flows freely and they talk. Of Yassen, first – Alex learns that he is a carpenter, and something of an architect, building dwellings and structures, fixing roofs and even mending furniture.

Alex reaches for his hands. They are pale and slender, as an aristocrat’s might be, but calloused like his own, from felling wood and swinging hammers. There are small scars, too, doubtless where a knife had slipped.

Alex tells him a few choice tales of conquest, and Yassen drinks the words in hungrily as Alex describes the cultures he has seen, the strange tongues and customs he has come to know.

After, Alex takes him back to bed. He has been told his stamina borders on the divine, but Yassen keeps pace with him, eager and willing until Alex exhausts himself. Alex wonders how long it would take to fuck Yassen into exhaustion. He would enjoy very much taking his pleasure from Yassen’s pliant, overstimulated body. What beautiful cries would he utter then, trembling in Alex’s arms?

He files the thought away. An experiment for another night, perhaps. They have many in store together, he hopes.

  
In between negotiations, Yassen shows him the wonders of this land. Alex had thought it barren at first, but it isn’t. The summer here is colder than he is used to, but it has its own fragile beauty, with its shortness. The flowers that bloom will only do so for days, weeks at the most. Then those riots of color, the flowering fields, they will yellow and die and disappear beneath a blanket of snow. But Yassen teaches him to love beauty because it is ephemeral.

Alex comes to realize that they are not a warrior people because their battles are for survival in this harsh environment that they have stubbornly made their home, where summer sometimes lasts mere weeks and the very air can kill. They use their strength not to swing swords, but to live here day by day, stubborn as all living things.

And Yassen revels in this wild, hostile place, at ease here like the bright fishes in the warm Mediterranean. One day, he leads Alex into a forest of birch trees, slender and pale like Yassen himself. “Take off your boots, my lord,” he encourages. He himself is barefoot, stepping through the morning dew.

“And will you tell me to take my sword off next?” Alex inquires, only half playful. He still does not know Yassen’s intentions well enough not to be wary. “For all I know, you hope to catch me naked and unawares.”

Yassen laughs, like the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“It’s magical to feel the life teeming beneath your feet,” he says. “I only hoped to share that pleasure with you.”

His eyes sparkle with hope and Alex obliges, slipping off his boots and letting Yassen lead him by the hand to a clearing where golden wildflowers reach to their waist. Still, he keeps one hand on his sword. If Yassen remarks it, he says nothing.

“Here,” Yassen says, tugging him close and pressing himself against Alex’s chest. Around them, sunlight ripples through the leaves, and it is indeed magical.

Yassen stands on tiptoes to reach Alex’s lips and kisses him amidst this sea of wild blooms. His wariness forgotten in this perfect silence of this secluded sanctuary, he presses Yassen close and parts his lips with his tongue. As always, Yassen yields happily to him, allowing Alex to explore his mouth.

Perhaps, he thinks as he bites playfully at Yassen’s plush lips, they can make love here sometime. He can just see it, those flower stalks broken by their weight as they tumble to the ground, petals everywhere, vivid blue and yellow against pale skin, their cries mixing with birdsong and rippling leaves.

In another forest, Yassen shows him riotous growths of ferns. “It is said that if you find one flowering on the shortest night of the year, it is an omen of good luck.”

But they do not find any flowering ferns. Instead, Alex takes Yassen back to his bed. He has no need of the luck of mystical flowers; he has his own, open and blooming for him.

Every night without fail, Yassen comes to his bed. He has Yassen every which way, spread on that bear pelt and in the fields of summertime flowers. Yassen possesses a dancer’s flexibility, and Alex enjoys discovering all the ways in which he can use that to his advantage to drive deep into him at that perfect angle that draws cries of ecstasy from Yassen. His slender waist fits perfectly into Alex’s broad hands, as does his delicate neck, and Alex likes to hold both tight as he takes his pleasure inside that body that yields so perfectly to his desires. Sometimes, he is quick; sometimes, he takes his time coaxing every possible sound from Yassen’s lips as the chilly sun coaxes the petals of the native flowers to open. He pleasures Yassen with his mouth, curious to hear the sounds that will slip from him and relishing the beautiful blush that spreads over his cheeks. He lies back and lets Yassen pleasure him with his mouth, a gentle hand to guide on the back of his head, and he especially likes those desperate gasps for air after Yassen has taken him deep. He explores Yassen’s body as he has explored each land he conquered, cataloguing each fine detail and adding it to a mental map. His particular favorite is the inside of Yassen’s knee, and the way Yassen trembles a little when Alex kisses the inside of his thigh.

Sometimes, he gives Yassen the choice of how they will lie together, and always Yassen wishes to revel in Alex’s strength. He asks to be taken against a wall, held up with ease. Once, he asks for Alex to subdue him, and it is more difficult than Alex had imagined, for Yassen is swift and slippery, slithering away from his grasp. Eventually, though, Alex succeeds, pinning him facedown and with an arm behind his back. They’re both breathing heavily, hard, and Yassen shifts his hips to press himself tantalizingly against Alex’s arousal. 

Suddenly, Alex has no patience. Yassen had prepared himself beforehand so that they could proceed swiftly once Alex had subdued him, but the second Alex takes his hand away from Yassen’s arm and shifts his weight, Yassen tries to slither away again.

Oh, the impertinence.

Easily, Alex flips him and pins his wrists, careful to keep his grasp light and allow merely his weight to keep Yassen immobilized.

“Do you _want_ to be hurt?” he asks. He could have subdued Yassen in seconds, but he has no desire to harm him, or to leave bruises on that pale skin.

“No,” Yassen admits.

“Then yield.”

Yassen blinks up at him. He is breathless beneath Alex, flushed, his hair askew, looking as if he’s just been ravished, and Alex needs suddenly, desperately, to make the appearance match the reality.

“I yield,” Yassen whispers breathlessly.

Alex takes him like a victor, like his body is a fortress he has conquered, and the fortress yields to him, all thought of previous resistance forgotten. He is loose and pliant in Alex’s arms, his delicate neck curving so perfectly it’s as if it seeks Alex’s hand around it, and Yassen’s eyes flutter closed with a little moan when he places it there, and then the rest of his body arches like a taut string and sings at Alex’s touch.

Yassen begins to spend his days with Alex as well as his nights. His small array of personal items joins Alex’s in the cabin. Neither of them remarks upon it; it is simply how things are. They spend comfortable days together, Alex writing missives and Yassen whittling and carving by his side when he isn’t fixing a roof or putting together a table.

Alex ceases to worry that Yassen might poison his food or sedate his wine.

“Why did you come to my bed so willingly?” he asks one day. “I came in conquest. I expected at least some resentment.” But Yassen had been nothing but eager since that first night. 

Yassen sits astride him where he sprawls in a chair, naked. Moments ago, Yassen had ridden them to completion. Alex had placed his hands on Yassen’s thighs, feeling those powerful muscles flexing beneath his touch and reveling in the strength that was his to command. It was intoxicating to feel it yield to him, and he could not resist tugging at that thread, one hand reaching for Yassen’s neck. He could feel Yassen’s thundering pulse, the delicate thread of his life running under his skin, and it would be so simple to extinguish, but Alex would never. He just likes the way Yassen’s eyes flutter closed, trusting, when Alex’s hand closes around his neck with the lightest squeeze. It has become, inevitably, the thing that brings him over the edge, and Alex has long forgotten that he used to demand his lovers awaited his permission for their climax.

Now, he rests their foreheads together, though his hand is still at Yassen’s neck, his fingers tracing the column of it while a thumb circles the hollow of his throat.

“It was a matter of time, before we were conquered,” Yassen says. He shifts, barely clinging to Alex, trusting that he’ll be caught if he falls. “Our harsh climate and our tactics have kept our enemies at bay, but truly it is a miracle we have lasted that long. You seemed a far kinder victor than many, the kind who would offer protection.”

“You are wise,” he says. “Perhaps I should have you as an advisor, on my council.”

“If you wish it,” Yassen says. “Also,” he adds, “I was curious. I had never shared a warrior’s bed before.”

“I could have been a brute,” he says. _Has_ been, in the past – not violent, never forcing another, but rough, if that was what he desired. Those who came willingly to his bed knew to expect it.

Yassen shrugs. “A chance I took.”

“And was bedding a warrior everything you imagined?” Alex inquires, as his finger trails over the knobs of Yassen’s spine. He hopes desperately that he had satisfied, and wasn’t that novel, to be so concerned? 

Yassen smiles mischievously. “That and more,” he says.

He drags out the negotiations as much as he can, but Yassen’s people are agreeable. They find his terms more than fair, and they are eager to please, afraid that Alex and his army will depart and leave them unprotected before far more savage conquerors. They are unfailingly polite, and there is little to discuss, really.

Still, Alex can be inventive when he wants to. He insists on detailing all the terms, to ensure there are no misunderstandings, he says. He lays down demands for how and where the temple to his gods will be raised, and he stays to watch it built. In the evenings, as Alex pores over his maps, laying out strategy and writing missives back to the Empire, Yassen sketches a blueprint with Alex’s aid, brows furrowed in concentration. The design imitates some of the columned architecture of Alex’s people, but adapted to the harsher climate and materials of this land. Yassen is in charge of the building, too, helping fell the trees that will make up the bones of the temple, sawing and hammering and directing workers until it is completed. Alex watches him with awe. Yassen has the skill of leading people, a mix of kindness and strictness that he himself had learned early, and all with an understated competence.

They admire the temple together when it is finished. It is breathtaking and intricate, a wooded structure with carved adornments on every corner and façade, each one done by Yassen’s hand over many long nights. He had poured all his skill and meticulous attention into each one, and Alex was unable to take his eyes off him, fixated on those competent hands as they carved and whittled.

“I don’t understand,” Yassen ventures as the takes in the results of his handiwork. The new temple stands next to the old, the structures mirroring each other but each bearing the character of their particular faith. “I had thought you would try to wipe our gods from the earth.”

“Gods are kept alive by devotion,” Alex explains. “There is no way to rip faith from a man’s heart, even if you burn his temples. It is something all gods understand. They would rather share devotion with other gods than have none at all.”

Alex insists, too, on training some of Yassen’s people as soldiers, and he examines their fortifications. What Yassen’s people lack the skill of fighting itself, they make up for in the cleverness of bending the land and all it offers them to their will. Their walled city sits atop a hill, a perfect vantage point with traps all around. The ramparts are manned by eagle-eyed watchers who can raise the alarm while the enemy is still miles away. There are slits for arrows, and sluices to rain down burning oil upon attacking hordes.

A sufficiently large and well-trained enemy could take the city – Alex has no doubt his own army could – but it would not be without significant loss. He understands now how they have been able to remain free for this long, just as he knows that it could not last forever. One day, a sufficiently large and motivated army would have come, and fought and burned and broken through all their defenses through sheer force.

But now, they have Alex’s protection. No other will ever take this city.

But there is only so long he can invent excuses and reasons to stay. He knows it is time to go, but he is loath to leave Yassen behind.

Perhaps he can take him with him, Alex thinks. But part of Yassen’s beauty is that he’s native to this strange and chilly land. Taking him with him would be like plucking a flower and attempting to transplant it. He thinks Yassen would wither beneath the hot Mediterranean sun.

Besides, he finds he does not want to go back. He wants to stay here, in this cabin, with its hearth and its bear pelt and Yassen in his bed. He had no desire to swing his sword.

They will winter here, he decides. They will need to winter somewhere, and it is already late summer. The cold comes early in this place. Why not here, with these people who are agreeable, who almost welcome them – insofar as conquerors are ever welcomed? Who knows how they will be greeted in the next place they march to? Better to rest here and gather their strength, win the loyalty of these people and show them what the Empire’s protection looks like. And when spring comes, they will depart, fortified.

Alex’s decision turns out to be a wise one, for winter comes earlier than expected, the nights stretching out and the leaves frosting over on the trees as their breath mists in the air. They rush to gather the rest of the harvest before the snow comes, fill up their stores of firewood and weave thick woolen blankets for all the additional men they will have to house and warm. Alex’s soldiers help, chopping wood and carrying bushels of grain and potatoes.

When the winter truly comes, the snow blanketing the land with quiet and a blinding whiteness, he marvels at how these people fight the bleak cold, with fire and light and alcohol. They fill their great hall with candles and torches and light the giant hearth and crowd inside, regaling each other with tales of gods and heroes. It is not unlike the many times Alex has sat around a fire, passing around a bowl of dark wine as they take turns spinning a song, though these heroes are different: they do not slay dragons or hydras, but outwit serpents and find cloaks of invisibility.

When the solstice comes, they fell giant fir trees and string them up with lights and decorations, and stay up late into the night to greet it, keeping the darkness of the longest night at bay through sheer willpower. Yassen dances again that night, flushed with joy and exertion, and Alex’s heart grows light as a butterfly in his chest at the thought that this man is his.

They light giant bonfires and dance around them, warmed by the heat of it and their joy, and they gather around it to sing songs to the accompaniment of strange stringed instruments. Even Yassen joins in, meeting Alex’s eyes over the fire as he sings the words of his melodious tongue: 

Я спросил у ясеня, где моя любимая,  
Ясень не ответил мне, качая головой.  
Я спросил у тополя: "Где моя любимая?" -  
Тополь забросал меня осеннею листвой.  
  
Я спросил у месяца: "Где моя любимая?" -  
Месяц скрылся в облаке - не ответил мне.  
Я спросил у облака: "Где моя любимая?" -  
Облако растаяло в небесной синеве...  
  
Друг ты мой единственный, где моя любимая?  
Ты скажи, где скрылася, знаешь, где она?  
Друг ответил преданный, друг ответил искренний,  
Была тебе любимая, была тебе любимая,  
Была тебе любимая, а стала мне жена.

“What did that mean?” he asks when Yassen is finished. Somehow, without knowing their meaning, the words and the melody have wrenched his heart open, as if a spell.

Yassen only smiles mischievously. 

“Perhaps you should learn our language, my lord,” he says, “and then I’ll sing it to you again.”

“Perhaps I should,” Alex agrees.

…..

Alex wouldn’t normally stop for gossip, but the other interlocutor is Yassen, who has his back to him. He shouldn’t – he trusts Yassen – but curiosity gets the better of him.

“Has he - ?” The man (one of the younger ones from the council, Lazar)doesn’t finish his sentence, but Yassen seems to understand exactly what he means.

“He has treated me with nothing but kindness,” Yassen says.

“He may have been gentle with you,” Lazar retorts. “But don’t mistake it for kindness. You know why we sent you to him.”

Alex seethes with fury. That he would hurt Yassen, with a word or a blow, is unthinkable. It infuriates him that they would think otherwise.

But it also makes him wonder why Yassen was sent to him. At first he had assumed it was the obvious – a gesture of goodwill in return for compromise in negotiations. But Yassen is still here, in his bed, and Alex has enjoyed having him there so much that he has barely let himself think why. He has liked it too much to want to face the potential truth of why.

But he must face it now, he realizes. He must ask.

And he does, that night, after he’s fucked Yassen thoroughly. If this is their last night together, he will take every moment of pleasure from his body first. Then, as Yassen lies sated beside him, he asks.

“Why were you sent to me?”

Yassen blinks at him, surprised.

“It was a gesture of goodwill,” Yassen says, echoing his own assumptions almost verbatim.

“Oh? And what did they hope for, in return for goodwill?” Has he really been blind? Perhaps there were machinations he didn’t see, behind Yassen’s pliant exterior. He has allowed himself to grow much too comfortable, with this man in his bed.

“Only that you would be amenable to kinder terms. We have heard of how cruel conquest can be.” That, too, he has heard many times, from Yassen and the council in negotiations. The story fits, fits so neatly that it makes Alex’s hair prickle.

“Is that all? _Tell me the truth._ ” He realizes he has raised his voice when Yassen shrinks away from him, and Alex curses himself, remembered the promise he’d made. He would never frighten Yassen.

“I had no insidious plans,” Yassen says carefully. “We don’t hide plots within plots. It was a simple exchange, my willing body for your kindness. I swear.”

“The negotiations are over,” Alex points out. “Yet you still come to my bed.”

“And I would continue for as long as you will have me,” Yassen says. “I like my place in your bed.”

He looks so guileless. Perhaps Alex is mad, to accept that appearance as truth. Perhaps he should send Yassen far from him, to be safe. But if none of what he has had with Yassen is real, then – what does any of it matter, really? The thought of this vast bed, cold without Yassen by his side, fills him with an unbearable emptiness. He can allow himself this risk.

  
And so he decides, instead, to show them all that he is no brute. They will all know how he treasures the gift they have sent to him, how anathema it would be to him to mistreat his precious flower. He has never mishandled Yassen, never left marks or bruises on his alabaster skin, but now they will see the full extent of his favor.

Yassen never kneels for him. Always, he sits by Alex’s side. Sitting by the bonfire, Yassen leans his head on Alex’s shoulder, and Alex drapes his cloak around the two of them. At the feast table, he always ensures Yassen has the choicest morsels.

Then, one night, he is summoned by a commotion. He reaches a darkened alley between two buildings, lit only by moonlight, to find Yassen with his clothes half off his body, though he tries to hold them up around himself with uncharacteristic prudishness. He’s trembling, too. Alex has never known Yassen to tremble or shiver, even in abominably frigid temperatures, and it makes a chill of foreboding creep up his spine. Beside him stands one of Alex’s soldiers – Govart, Alex recognizes, a brute who has always itched to cause trouble. His lip curls with disdain. Two other soldiers crowd around – one of them had discovered the two, the other come to fetch Alex.

“What happened?” he demands.

“Your pet came to me, offering to spread his legs,” Govart says immediately, as if they’re not standing in an alleyway, one obviously chosen from its darkness and its distance from the great hall.

He turns to Yassen. “What happened?”

Yassen opens his mouth to speak, but the words don’t seem to come.

“You see?” the soldier interjects. “He can’t answer you, because he’d have to admit that he’s a whore, looking for any cock to fill him. He spread his legs for the enemy practically the night we arrived, and you expect his loyalty?”

Alex is tempted to backhand him.

He has never cared if his soldiers took lovers among the local people, so long as they did not do it by force. They knew it was the one transgression he tolerated least; he had impressed it into them early and firmly through a public spectacle of the punishment to those who violated his word. That Govart would dare, and with a man specifically under Alex’s protection –

It is intolerable.

“ _Yassen,_ ” he practically growls. “The truth.” He needs it, and he needs it here, and now, publicly, so he can make a spectacle of this – this vile creature.

“He came to me, my lord, and when I tried to resist – “ his words falter. But Alex has heard enough.

Of course Yassen would have tried to resist. He is strong, and fearless, but smaller than Govart, who shares Alex’s brutish strength, and he has none of the skills of a trained fighter. He wouldn’t have known where to find the weaknesses through which a smaller man can fell a larger one.

Alex should have taught him. He should have protected him.

“Execute him,” he orders, and doesn’t even stay to relish Govart’s look of shock and fury.

“You choose _him,_ over your own people?” he shouts as he’s dragged off, but Alex ignores him. He turns his attention instead to Yassen, draping his cloak over Yassen’s shoulders. “Come,” he coaxes.

Yassen follows him a few steps before he tugs at Alex. “Wait. My lord.”

Alex stops. Yassen looks up at him shyly, clinging to him. “Don’t kill him. Please.”

Alex narrows his eyes. “Why? He laid a hand on you. He would have done worse.”

“I know. But I don’t want a man’s life taken on my behalf. I couldn’t bear it. Please.”

Alex sighs. “Very well.” He turns to the soldiers dragging Govart to a dark cell, to be kept until a dawn execution.

“Eighty lashes, and strip him of his rank,” he orders. “But don’t kill him.” He turns to Yassen. “Satisfied?”

“Thank you,” Yassen says. Alex notices he’s trembling again.

“Come,” Alex coaxes.

As soon as they’re home, he orders a bath drawn, and while the servants hurry about heating and carrying water, he pulls Yassen close to examine him.

“I’m alright,” Yassen insists, though the way he trembles like a leaf belies his words. “You arrived just in time.”

“Let me make sure of that,” Alex says, and to his surprise, Yassen doesn’t protest. He quietly lets himself be undressed and examined by Alex.

Alex finds a bruise blooming on Yassen’s wrist, the first he has ever seen on that pale skin, and it makes him see red. It does not matter that it was left by a hand other than his own. Alex had failed to protect him, and that was as good as leaving that mark himself.

Finally, the bath is ready, and Alex coaxes Yassen into it, settling himself by its side and holding Yassen’s hand. Frantically, Yassen scrubs at his skin, as if trying to scrub the trace of another’s touch. Alex watches him and, for the first time in his life, learns what it is to feels powerless.

He doesn’t like it at all.

When Yassen steps out of the bath, it is Alex who performs the servant’s task of drying him. Alex who guides him to bed and pulls him close, their habitual position of Yassen curled up against his chest.

“Sleep,” he orders him gently.

“Do you not want me anymore?” Yassen asks in a small voice.

It takes several seconds for Alex to understand what Yassen means by that, and when he does, he’s seized by the urge to tear Govart limb from limb.

“Of course I want you,” he says adamantly. “But you have been through an ordeal. You need rest, and comfort – “

“I need you. Please.” Yassen twists in his arms, turning to face him. “The only way I can forget how he violated me is with you inside me, where you belong.”

It is something Alex cannot deny him.

He rolls over, bracketing Yassen with his arms, works him open gently and takes him. Yassen clings to him through it all, face pressed to Alex’s chest and eyes squeezed shut, like he’s trying to shut out all his other senses and feel nothing but Alex inside him.

“I’m here,” he whispers. “I’m here, and you’re mine, and nothing could take me from you.”

Yassen just gives a plaintive whimper, and comes with a sob.

Once Alex finishes, he moves to pull out, but Yassen clings to him. “Don’t go,” he whispers. Alex obliges that, too, remaining as he is and burying his head in the crook of Yassen’s neck.

Slowly, Yassen seems to relax under him, his breathing evening out. Alex realizes that he’s fallen asleep with his cock still inside him.

Moving as carefully as he can, he pulls out and lays himself down beside his sleeping lover. Yassen doesn’t stir when Alex pulls him against his chest and covers them both with the pelt.

They wake early the next morning, for punishments are scheduled for dawn. Reluctantly, he slips out of the warmth of their bed, and rouses Yassen.

“It would not be wise for me to be there,” Yassen insists, but he gets out of the bed. At least some of his usual self has returned, Alex thinks, with that perceptive wisdom. “You have already shown me favor above your own soldiers. This endangers your standing with them.”

“Nonsense,” Alex says. “He violated one of my most sacred orders. I do not permit my soldiers to rape. That it was you is an additional insult, but not the only one.”

“Still. As far as appearances go – “

“Yassen,” Alex cuts him off. “You will be there. Govart will be punished, and you will see that you are safe. They will learn their lesson, and no one will ever hurt you again.” He will make sure of it. Yassen is under his protection, and he has failed at it once, but he will not permit himself to fail a second time.

The morning air is chilly as they step out, their breaths misting in the air. It is quiet, the soldiers arrayed in neat rows for the spectacle not daring to speak a word.

Govart tries to be stoic as they bring him out and tie him up, but Alex can see the fear in his frame. Eighty lashes will leave him scarred for life, and recovering for weeks.

But it is what he deserves.

“Begin,” Alex commands.

As the whip swings through the air with a hiss, Yassen presses close to him, and Alex puts an arm around him. When Govart begins to cry out, Yassen squeezes his eyes shut and buries his head in Alex’s chest, and Alex holds him close through that, too.

He watches, however. He watches to be sure his man does his job properly, and that the lesson sticks, and Yassen is never hurt again.

He would be glad to swing the whip himself, if such a menial task were appropriate for one of his standing.

When they return home, Yassen seems more himself again, and Alex is glad of it. Perhaps the punishment had done as he intended, reassured Yassen that he was safe.

“My lord,” Yassen ventures. “We must speak.”

At some point, Yassen has become a _de facto_ advisor, and it is a good sign that he is willing to speak frankly.

“Yes?”

“Govart dared do what he did because he knew your soldiers grow discontented with the favor you show me above them. What he did, he did because he hoped to break us asunder. He told me so, thinking I’d never get the chance to repeat it. He thinks I make you soft. And he will not be the last to act on it. I am a liability to you.”

“ _No,_ ” Alex growls. “After that spectacle? No one else will touch you.”

“And that is the danger,” Yassen says patiently. “You have stayed here longer than necessary. You have shown me favor, and today was yet another demonstration of it. You tread on dangerous ground. It would be better for you if you let me go.”

“ _Never._ They will not take you from me,” he replies angrily. “The only man who can do that is you.”

“My lord?” Yassen is startled, oscillating somewhere between fear (Alex curses; had he not made himself a promise?) and surprise.

“If you wished to leave me, you would go freely. But no other man will take you from my arms,” Alex vows. “Do you understand?”

“Then I will stay.” Yassen pauses. “It hurts your reputation, but if you will have me, I do not have the strength to leave you myself.”

“Then I think it’s time you ceased addressing me as _lord,_ ” Alex says. “To you, I am Alex.”

Yassen is clearly stunned. “My – Alex,” he says, savoring the word. He throws himself into Alex’s arms. “Alex,” he breathes.

Alex holds him close.

Spring comes, and it is time to depart, but Alex doesn’t have the strength to leave either. He is enamored of his own spring flower. Yassen may look like the pale lilies that bud through the snow at the first hints of spring, elegant and fragile, like they could be felled by the slightest breeze or a returning snowfall. But those delicate flowers are the hardiest, Yassen shows him, to bloom up out of the frozen ground, unafraid of oncoming storms.

Yassen takes him swimming. In early springtime, the water is frigid, but Yassen strips and dives in like it is the balmy Mediterranean.

“Join me, my lord,” he calls. He only ever uses the title in jest, now. It is their little joke, between the two of them, for the rest still think Yassen addresses him truly as “lord.”

“Will you keep me warm if I do?” he asks.

Yassen emerges from the water, dripping, and Alex’s throat goes dry. Suddenly, he doesn’t feel very cold at all, even in the breeze that comes off the water. Heat pools in his belly, and he longs to lick those drops off that alabaster skin.

“Of course, my lord,” Yassen says. He holds out a hand.

Alex joins him. He curses at the chilly bite of the water, but Yassen kisses him into silence, and he permits it. And Yassen does keep him warm, letting Alex fuck him there in the water until warmth spreads throughout his entire body. And he does get to lick the drops of water from the curve of Yassen’s neck.

“Your troops grow restless,” Yassen reminds him. “You have stayed here much longer than necessary, and they begin to question your judgment.”

“Are you so eager to have me leave, then?” he asks.

“No. But I know that I cannot keep you forever,” Yassen says sadly.

Alex doesn’t want to think of what comes next.

“Then let us enjoy the time we have, and not think of this,” he says. “Just a little longer.”

Yassen doesn’t protest. 

One spring morning, trumpets sound, a warning of attack. It rouses him from his bed; it seems the oncoming hordes had thought to take them by surprise.

Swiftly, he dons his armor. He had been sleeping with Yassen, as always, and the other man rouses just as quickly.

He pulls Yassen close before he goes, wanting to give him a quick parting kiss, but Yassen clings to him.

“Come back to me,” he whispers with wide, desperate eyes. He has never seen Yassen so afraid before, not even the night Govart laid a hand on him. 

“I swear it,” Alex promises, pressing a longer kiss of reassurance against Yasen’s lips. The promise is so easy to make he gives it little thought. He has never worried about returning from battle intact.

Alex’s soldiers are well-trained, and they react immediately. Even in peace, they are vigilant, and their swords are sharpened, their armor polished. They don it swiftly and form ranks, eager for battle after a calm of so many months.

Yassen’s people react swiftly, too. They do not scream and flee. They may not be warriors, but they have a hardened practicality. Women gather children and shepherd them into the great hall, while others rush to prepare boiling water and bandages, sutures and herbs and oils for the wounded that will return. The men rush to the ramparts. Alex is glad that he has instructed them all, ensured that the fortifications of Yassen’s people align with the tactics of his own. They hurry to boil oil and water while archers take up their places on the ramparts. They may not be needed – those barbarian hordes may not even get so close. But they must be meticulous.

Alex rides out at the head of his army, glad for the opportunity to show what the Empire’s protection looks like.

…..

Yassen goes to the temple he has built. He has not been inside since he had erected it, and he does not know how to pray to Alex’s gods. But he must try.

Alex had told him they thrive on devotion and spilled blood. He has little of the former to offer; it all belongs to Alex. But he has just as much blood as any other man, and without stopping to flinch, he slices open his palm and squeezes the blade in his hand.

“Please,” he whispers, kneeling before the warrior-goddess he himself had carved. “I do not know the form of the worship you desire, but tell me, and you shall have it. Take as much of my blood as you wish, only keep him safe. Protect him, and you will have from me what you desire.”

Silence.

He sighs. It was too much to hope for. Still, he remains kneeling, letting the blood soak into the wooden floor. He stays like that for a long time, until he hears noise – different noise, no longer the distant sounds of battle, but cries that sound like victory.

He had no doubt Alex’s soldiers would prevail, but his heart stutters in his chest as he wonders if Alex will be riding back with them.

He makes his way through the crowd. There are men and women both, those the soldiers had taken as lovers, throwing themselves into beloved arms or – rarely – weeping. The losses are small.

And there, covered in blood and grime but alive, so beautifully alive, and somehow glowing golden in the sun, is Alex, riding back as victor. A cheer goes up when they see him, and Yassen wants to throw himself into his arms, but that would not do. It would only embarrass them both. He is forced to wait as Alex dismounts, gives orders regarding the dead and wounded, a thousand other minor commands, before he can turn his attention to Yassen.

Then, only then, with the crowd parting, can Yassen finally throw himself into Alex’s arms.

…..

“You’re safe,” Yassen whispers in relief against Alex’s armor. He doesn’t seem to care that he will end up equally covered in blood and grime. “You came back to me.”

Alex catches Yassen’s hands in his to squeeze in reassurance. “I promised I would,” he says, though he is pleasantly touched by Yassen’s worry. He has only ever been greeted with cheers and accolades upon his bloody return from battle.

But Yassen seems to flinch at the touch, and looking down, he notices the blood on Yassen’s hands.

“You’re hurt,” he says. “How are you hurt?” Yassen had stayed behind the ramparts, where it was safe -

“I went to pray to your gods to protect you,” Yassen admits.

Alex lifts Yassen’s hand to his lips and kisses the palm. He is touched that Yassen was willing to spill blood for his protection.

Still. He shouldn’t have.

“Come,” he says. “Let’s go home and I will tend to your wound.”

He throws aside his armor – a servant or page will clean it, it is no concern of his now – and focuses on Yassen.

“You are injured too, and I have only a scratch,” Yassen protests.

It is true, Alex’s arm bleeds from a deep cut. But as far as injuries go, it is minor. Yassen’s is more important, and he fetches bandages and an ointment while gesturing for Yassen to sit.

This will be another scar on Yassen’s calloused hands, Alex realizes. Another mark on his skin because of him.

“It was unnecessary,” Alex says as he bandages Yassen’s hand with all the gentleness his hands possess – which, used to wielding a sword, isn’t much. But Yassen sits patiently, only wincing slightly at the sting and allowing Alex’s ministrations. “I have the favor of the gods. They protect me.”

Yassen withdraws his hand, still half-bandaged. He stays silent for several moments, and then, of all things, he smacks Alex.

It is perhaps indicative of the liberties Alex allows Yassen, that he is permitted this one with no repercussions. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Yassen demands, but he sounds more relieved than angry.

“Perhaps I wanted you to see me as merely another man.”

“But you are like no other man,” Yassen says softly.

“Yes,” Alex agrees. He had always considered it a blessing, when fame and glory followed him, but now he finds that he has little desire to be a giant among men.

Even victory doesn’t taste the same. Before, he’d reveled in the laurels and the accolades, the joyous cries that greeted his return and the stories told around the fire. But now he is simply glad to return to Yassen’s arms and their hearth. He had thought of it as he fought, intent on spilling his last drop of blood if that is what he had to do to protect it.

Still, one thing is unchanged. The lust that follows victorious battle courses through his blood, and he happily tumbles Yassen onto the bed to slake it.

But no, even this is different. He has taken so many warm bodies to his bed, many who were eager to feel like they shared in some portion of a great warrior’s victory. But burying himself in Yassen’s body is like returning to home and hearth. They spend only as long on preparation as is necessary for Alex not to hurt him, and then Alex drives inside him and bottoms out, holds him close and fucks him into the mattress and doesn’t let go even after he has finished, while Yassen coaxes him on and clings close.

This. This is what he went into battle to protect.

It is novel that it exists.  
  


After that, he lays down his sword, and he makes Yassen his, and he stays. He was the Empire’s greatest warrior, once, but now he merely governs one of its distant outposts. The army moves on without him, while he oversees the harvests, and collects tributes to send back to Rome, and looks for flowering ferns. He is respected here, and beloved even: once their conqueror, he is now their protector, the sword and shield won for them by Yassen.

He gathers yellow wildflowers in the meadow where Yassen had kissed him and places them in vases around the cabin, decorating it with patches of sunshine. He learns Yassen’s tongue, and this time, when Yassen sings him the song of a lonely lover asking an ash tree about his beloved, Alex understands the words. He even learns to bear the winters, with Yassen warming his bed and a bear pelt covering them, and when they make love, he forgets the cold completely.

His sword rests by his bed. He has not touched it in years, but he keeps it close, for he knows how cruel the world is, and he would gladly shield Yassen with his very life, for he knows the gods would not protect him now if it came to battle.

But no battles come. After he defeated the last attempt at conquest, no other enemy attempts it.

He wants nothing more.

….

Yassen is wandering through that memorable meadow when the gods come to him. Alex’s, not his own. He recognizes her at once, for she has something of Alex in them, or rather, it is Alex who has some of her divinity, with the way she glows as if woven out of sunlight.

“Yassen.” It is a goddess of war and strategy who speaks to him, with spear and armor.

He has no knowledge of how to greet a goddess, so he bows to her as he would have to Alex, long ago.

“You prayed to us for his life, did you not?” she speaks without preamble, and Yassen does not need to ask who she speaks of.

“I did not think you heard me.”

Athena shrugs – or does something rather godlike that, in the language of a human body, would be a shrug.

“We hear all prayers. But he was already under our protection. Reassuring you was unnecessary.”

Yassen nods. He could understand why a goddess would not bother.

“You care for him,” she continues. “Love him, do you not?”

Yassen hesitates. Some feeling inside him tells him that for a goddess to know this truth of his being is dangerous. And yet, he is sure she already knows. Her question is mere formality.

“Yes,” he says.

“Then let him go. He was made for greater things. Let him follow his destiny again. Let him pursue again the greatness that made you love him.”

But it is not the warrior in Alex that Yassen loves.

“I did not cage him,” he says. “He is free to leave, but he has chosen to stay by my side.”

“His love for you is his cage, and so there he will stay,” she says sadly. “Thus it must be you who leaves, for his sake and yours.”

Yassen shakes his head. “He is happy, and through some miracle, I am that happiness. I will not take that from him. He is half my soul, and I will be his until the end of days, if that is his wish,” he says.

Oh, what a fool he was, then.

“That is your final answer, then?”

“It is,” Yassen says firmly.

Athena shakes her head. “A pity.”  
  


“Your gods came to visit me today,” he tells Alex that night, as they lie together.

Alex goes still behind him. “What did they want?”

“They want you to leave me,” Yassen says softly. His heart pounds in his chest. What if Alex decides to listen to their call after all? What if this was only a brief but happy interlude? Only Alex’s love binds him to this place, and that is a bond that can be severed. “They say you are destined for greatness, and I hold you back. That I should let you go, so you can follow that path.”

“And? Will you leave me?”

It’s not the answer he expects at all. “Never,” he says adamantly. “But if you want to follow their call, I would not stop you – “

“Never,” Alex interrupts. He pulls Yassen closer, holds him so tight that he can barely breathe. “No man will tear us apart. I swear it to you.”

“Gods are not men,” Yassen points out.

“Very well. No being, then, will ever rend us asunder.” He places his hand on Yassen’s heart. “I give you my word.”

And Yassen takes him at his word. Oh, how young and naïve they are, to think that love was enough to keep it. 

…..

They wed. Alex’s people hardly blinked when men lay with men, but Yassen’s went so far as to permit marriage, and so in the sight of Yassen’s gods (for Alex knows that he has fallen out of favor with his own) the bond of love between them is strengthened with yet another tie. He carries Yassen like a bride once again, but this time it is over the threshold of that same cabin where they had first made love. They live together happily for long years of peace, long enough for old age to find them, even.

And then the gods curse them.

The gods had always loved him. He killed for them. He helped found Rome, and the gods were pleased, for more believers meant more power. He was meant for more conquest, but Yassen seduced him. Caused him to set aside his sword and take up a place by the hearth. He vowed to never kill again if it meant having Yassen by his side.

The gods were displeased.

Alex threw aside all their favor, and for what? This mortal.

Well, if Alex would have Yassen instead of fame and glory and their gift of martial prowess, let him. But nothing in this world comes without a cost. Yassen would be his, for all eternity, and yet for only a few years at a time until Alex was snatched away once again by a bloody death, cursed to use his gift forever to change the course of the world.

And if Yassen would steal Alex’s heart and his devotion, which belonged to the gods alone, they would curse him too.

Yassen would have the immortality of the gods, since he wanted so badly what was theirs. He would watch Alex die in his arms, again and again, powerless to save him. 

That was the cost of daring to love one favored by the gods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I was writing, I imagined Alex and Yassen looking a lot like this illustration of Damen and Laurent from Captive Prince, except that, uh, Alex is obviously a bit paler: https://www.deviantart.com/merwild/art/Captive-Prince-643472776
> 
> The song Yassen sings is from the Soviet film "The Irony of Fate," which I thought was fitting because Yassen means "ash tree" in Russian: 
> 
> I asked the ash tree,  
> Where is my beloved?  
> The ash shook its head  
> Without answering.
> 
> I asked the poplar,  
> Where is my beloved?  
> The poplar covered me  
> With autumn leaves
> 
> I asked the moon,  
> Where is my beloved?  
> The moon disappeared inside a cloud,  
> Not answering me.
> 
> I asked the cloud,  
> Where is my beloved?  
> The cloud melted away  
> Into the blue of the sky.
> 
> Tell me, my only friend,  
> Where is my beloved?  
> Tell me, where did she hide?  
> Do you know where she is?
> 
> My devoted friend,  
> My sincere friend answered:  
> She was your beloved,  
> But she became my wife.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know Yassen's dacha is supposed to be in St. Petersburg. I prefer Moscow. :P


End file.
